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NEWMAN: Mine was a distant relationship. I don't know that we ever connected as father and son. But just the fact that his sporting-goods business survived the Depression was a testimony to his integrity and to his honesty and to his reputation. That really stuck with me. One of the great anguishes of my life is that he didn't see my success. He thought I was a ne'er-do-well. He would have taken some pride in my success. He knew what that struggle to survive amounts to.
HANKS: My dad had a totally different personality and character than mine. He was a very shy man who was not good at communicating. I was willing to pretty much do anything. As I got older and was appearing in school plays, my dad sat there and said, "How does this kid get up and do this?" It was the first time I felt he had an admiration for one of my qualities, because it was a quality that he didn't have. By the time I was actually doing something that was quite astounding to him, it was too late for us to relate to one another in a different way. We never shared any bona-fide heart-to-hearts.
NEWMAN: When my brother and I went into the war [Newman was a radio operator in WW II], my father wrote us every single day, each one of us. Every day for three years, he wrote us a letter. If you go back and look at the letters, they were distant. There was no familial kind of sense to them. But there was an obligation to somehow remind us that there was somebody back home that was thinking about us.
Tom, you came from a broken home. Did you try to give your sons more stability?
HANKS: My oldest son [actor Colin Hanks] is 24. Throughout the vast majority of his youth and adolescence, I did not have a clue as to how to be a father or a parent. I was at that point in my career where it was all about getting work. My daughter and he lived with their mom [Samantha Lewes]. With my younger kids [with wife Rita Wilson], now that I'm 45, it's of paramount importance to me that they have much more concrete security and stability. I have much more ability to provide that for them now. With my older kids, I simply wasn't able to do it.
Because of your fame, do you both feel an obligation to be socially active?
HANKS: Responsibility is the word I would use. Because if guys like me don't do it, who's going to? Sure it's an obligation, but the Jeffersonian anarchist in me, the 1960s spirit of the Peace Corps, the Bobby Kennedy-esque young Democrat that I've always considered myself to be is the guy who says, "Don't curse the darkness; light a candle."
NEWMAN: I was pretty quiet until the Vietnam War. Then I became very active in that 1968 campaign. My highest single honor is that I was No. 19 on Nixon's enemies list. All the other actors were so jealous. But volunteerism is the best part of America. There's a much more personal kind of gluttony that exists today that didn't exist then. You can see it in business ethics.
Did you create the Scott Newman Foundation out of that sense of activism? [Newman's son Scott died of a drug overdose in 1978.]